President Clinton’s call for a yearlong “dialogue” on race is proof that in a democra-cy such as ours, everyone’s opinion is equally sought, equally valid, and equally pointless. You may not want to hear what I have to say, and I may not want to hear what you have to say, but together as Americans there’s no issue we can’t gum to death. Only with the frank and open exchange of blather can we get Jesse Jackson off our case. Politically Incorrect, hosted by Bill Maher—actor, author (True Story, a novel, 1994), and stand-up comic—is a forum founded on the same open-exchange principle, but with a more exclusive membership. Premiering on cable’s Comedy Central in 1993, P.I. brings together celebrity pundits to discuss current events, with no pesky emphasis put on actual knowledge. Set against a Roman-coliseum backdrop of broken columns and plastic vines (not a nurturing environment), Politically Incorrect offers the opportunity of seeing “name” performers and politicians pried loose from their handlers and forced to fend for themselves. When the mix works and the incongruities jibe, it’s like that great moment on SCTV when Count Floyd said, “The kid from Deliverance makes a good point … ” When it doesn’t, everyone sits there with heavy hands, in mutual paralysis. On one episode, Martin Amis, embarked on a whirlwind tour to suppress excitement for his novel The Information, could be seen taking astral leave of his body as Maher asked the panel to discuss the dilemma “Who should you save from a fire—a newborn infant or Colin Powell?” Despite its human statues and Pinteresque pauses, P.I. created enough excitement to make it the top-rated show on Comedy Central.

Then, in 1996, two major moves shook the faithful. First, the show moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Maher has a home. Internet kibitzers worried that the show risked losing its caustic bite by leaving the world headquarters of wise-guy mouth for a city where betrayal floats behind a bland smile and a yoga body-glow. To abandon the asphalt of Jimmy Breslin and Law & Order for the space-cadet academy of Saved by the Bell and Baywatch smacked of showbiz sellout. The second move was even more upmarket. Politically Incorrect was summoned to the majors: ABC offered Maher the opportunity to take his show to the network, where it would follow Ted Koppel’s Nightline, a berth that would offer P.I. potentially both more prominence and prestige. Potential doesn’t always pan out. It wasn’t self-evident that P.I. and Nightline would prove a smooth fit: Maher himself thought the two shows might not mesh, Nightline’s constituency being more serious and (my word, not his) hierarchical. For Nightline is the supreme policy-wonk Rolodex of the Eastern Establishment cognitive elite, where the experts are kept in Se&ntildeor Wences boxes until Ted bids them speak. Inside-the-Beltway gas emitters like James Glassman, a Washington Post columnist and the host of CNN’s Sunday Capital Gang, were among those most scornful of P.I.’s amateur opinionizing. Glassman, who appeared on the show in 1993, told U.S. News & World Report that he didn’t appreciate playing the stooge. “The purpose was to focus on Bill what’s-his-name—Maher?—to showcase his wit. He certainly wasn’t interested in what I had to say.” After Nightline, would Politically Incorrect’s talking heads look like shrunken heads by comparison?

And then there was the Zeitgeist element. The Vulcan death grip of Political Correctness had loosened since the show’s debut in 1993. Although P.C. is still entrenched in the culture, finding a permanent clubhouse in the academic journals, the selection committees of arts panels, and the stale newsrooms of metropolitan dailies, it seemed less like a rising dragon than a dying quail. If anything, being un-P.C. could be a career boon, as witness the publicity bonus Don Imus received after making the president and the First Lady fume. With the eroding of left-right hostilities, the dominant impulse of the 90s aims toward an amoebic consensual politics in which prob­lem solving takes precedence over ideological orthodoxy. Even on Crossfire, the combatants can’t work up the old hothead froth. With the feel-good factors of a rising stock market, lowering unemployment, and general peace, Politically Incorrect seemed to have less gruel on which to feed. Turned out, everyone’s qualms were for naught—Politically Incorrect has not merely survived, but prevailed. It has established a solid niche for itself after Nightline, seen its audience and revenues increase (Variety called it “the main propellor of growth” in late-night ad sales), and eaten into the second half of the Late Show with Da-vid Letterman. ABC gave P.I. a vote of confidence in July by running it live in prime time. It’s true that, by settling on the West Coast, P.I. has cut back on word whizzes such as Fran Lebowitz, Lynn Snow­den, and the com­edian Marc Mar­on, and is now more likely to saddle us with local produce like lawyer Susan Estrich, who ornately vomits all her answers, and MTV “personalities” whose 15 minutes of fame seem to expire before our eyes. Yet the show can’t be said to have gone sugary. If anything, it has more sit-down swag­ger than before.

The key to the show’s success is not what’s new and hip about it, but what’s old and abrasive. “My show is retro,” Bill Maher told Playboy. Although Maher models himself on Johnny Carson, from the solid encasement of his torso to the way he hushes his lips with his trigger finger and rises on his heels after a punch line, the show itself is pre-Carson in its sensibility. As brilliant as Carson was, his Tonight Show was a rigidly controlled entertainment bio­dome; ever vigilant, Johnny would zap the first flare of controversy with an ice beam from his Aqua Velva eyes. Politically Incorrect is a throwback to the shooting rapids of talk shows hosted by Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Dick Cavett, David Suss­kind, and even Merv Griffin in his New York days, back when producers didn’t feel every segment had to be plastered wall-to-wall with scripted comedy bits. When VH1 broadcasts reruns of Cavett’s ABC show, psychedelic time capsules which feature interviews with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Jop­lin, and the Jefferson Airplane, it’s startling to see how unguarded and eye-level it all was. It was before every celebrity became his own product placement—even the rock gods seem accessible. The debate over the war in Vietnam and the civil-rights movement made 60s and early-70s talk shows more tense and crackly than they’ve been before or since. I can recall hecklers jeering the journalist I. F. Stone from the Cavett audience, a Susskind panel on Radical Chic that was ready to hang Tom Wolfe in effigy. Now talk-show guests make news not from what they say but from how they behave, as witness Farrah Fawcett’s flameout on Letterman, where she flapped like a bird struck by an airliner.

Politically Incorrect is one of the few spots on TV where there are true spontaneous combusts. Sometimes the spat is intramural, as when Chevy Chase complained about the mindless effect of TV, and producer Steven Boch­co (L.A. Law, NYPD Blue) shot back, “I’ve seen a lot of your movies and most of them are crap.… Your movies have zero social redeeming value.” (Maher later had to restrain Chase from leaving the studio—it was like placating a bear.) Most of the outbursts, however, cut along liberal-conservative lines: Sandra Bernhard spit­ting at the rabid right-winger John Lofton (“I wanted to go to my room,” recalls journalist Bill Zehme, who was also on the panel); Chris Rock calling Laura Ingraham a “bitch”; Harvey Fierstein exploding at Michael Reagan, “Fuck you and fuck your father!” over President Reagan’s aids policy (a curse that was edited out from the broadcast). Ironically, it’s usually the liberals, who otherwise pride themselves on the power of persuasion in the face of ignorant prejudice, who personalize the debate and lash out, casting their opponents as morally defective. When Tom Fitton, a hapless yuppie conservative, argued that Africa had imploded since the end of colonialism, the comedian Jon Stewart said, “What happened to you as a child that makes you like this? Who took your lunch money?”

This ad hominem approach is also a throwback to earlier TV. When William F. Buckley Jr. first appeared on the scene in the early 60s, a square hipster and clean-cut fop whose silver-tongued phrasing resonated like a jazz vibraphone, all-heart liberals such as Jack Paar could only shake their heads and wonder. After Buckley’s appearance on his show, in 1962, a controversial visit which resulted in a flurry of telegrams and a phone call from President Kennedy, Paar said, “What I can’t stand is that these people when they talk they have no feeling of humanity—they just don’t seem to care about people.” Liberals still view themselves as people-­persons, with a monopoly on mensch-hood.

The lumps some conservatives have taken on P.I. have led others to accuse Maher of slanting his show. Andrew Stuttaford wrote in the National Review, “Whatever its claims, Politically Incorrect still plays by the Left’s rules.” Despite Maher’s iconoclasm, the comic is a closet lockstep liberal, Stuttaford contended. “Mr. Maher favors the death penalty, but is also pro-choice and pro–gun control. He will tell risqué jokes, call female guests ‘baby,’ and talk sensibly about today’s poisonous gender politics; but at the same time, says a Website for ­Maher fans, he admires ‘smart women.’” As compared with the dumb broads the National Review presumably prefers. Even if we grant this checklist of positions, I’ve seen no evidence of political favoritism in Maher’s handling of guests. He collects scalps from all denominations. (His favoritism expresses itself only in his easier rapport with fellow comics like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry Miller.) No, the subpar conservative performance on P.I.—the flat champagne of Arianna Huffington, the homespun dumb-cluck utterances of Celeste Greig (a heavily accented Republican Dr. Ruth type whose solution to rape is “cut the penis”), the one-note talking points of the leggy neutron-blonde Laura Ingraham clones—is the product of a self-inflicted lobotomy. It reflects the larger brain drain of the conservative movement, which can’t count on even Rush Limbaugh to rouse the choir. They’re all punched out. Bill Clinton’s marshmallow persona has absorbed their every blow, leaving no imprint, and their arm-weariness has migrated to their heads. So they sit and sulk.

Bill Maher’s politics aren’t bleeding-heart liberal, they’re throbbing-boner libertarian. According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, Maher was an English major at Cornell whose favorite book was Heart of Darkness, yet he confesses that he hasn’t read a book in years, and that his “shelves feature not Conrad but bound volumes of Playboy.” Bound volumes of Playboy! Now, there’s class with a capital K. The library defines the man. For Bill Maher is the last of the Playboy philosophers, a bachelor-pad neo-retro surveyor of human folly. He aspires to the velvet smoking jacket and pipe. Like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy, an epicurean manifesto published in endless installments in Playboy as a response to the shiny-utensil puritanism of the Eisenhower era, Maher proudly stands on his hind legs for individual freedom in the private sphere (pro-porn) and prudent restraint in the public sphere (pro–gun control). Or as he proclaimed in a Politically Incorrect intro, “Now, I’m not recommending excessive drinking, illegal drugs, and fast women—although they’ve always worked for me—but isn’t America all about at least having the choice?”

Individual choice—that’s what it’s all about. And some choices are more individual than others. Entertainment Weekly reported that Maher has been rumored to swing solo on the set of his show, masturbating in his dressing room before a broadcast, a regular Alexander Portnoy (knock first, then duck). It’s a charge he halfheartedly acknowledges. “Uhhhh, I’m sure I have,” he told the magazine. “I wouldn’t say it’s a ritual. I mean, we’ve all been horny and had to relieve ourselves, but it’s not like ‘Oh, it’s 5:10, I don’t want to be disturbed for the next 81⁄2 minutes.’” One showbiz legend making the rounds is that Maher’s faithful partner during these interludes is an airline pillow. Is it a different pillow each time, or a “special” pillow? Any particular airline? And what becomes of the pillow? Are there tongs big enough to carry it away? … Maher is also said to use abusive language about and toward women, referring to them by their body parts. He either has intimacy issues or is, as one former guest phrased it for me, “a pre-eminent jerk.”

When Hefner began pecking the Playboy Philosophy at the typewriter in the royal self-exile of the Huysmans-like chamber of his mansion in Chicago, swigging Pepsi in his bathrobe and keeping a vampire’s hours, Enlightenment dandies like him still believed in criminal rehabilitation, racial harmony, and the eradication of poverty—in the perfectibility of man. There was no Original Sin, no evil, only ancient taboos and entrenched mental errors. Repression and irrational fear were blocking us from our rightful inheritance as free beings. Once we rid ourselves of Judeo-Christian hang-ups and grooved unto each other in fleshly delight, we would become rational instruments of joy—citizen-swingers, capable of mixing the perfect martini and keeping the next-door neighbor’s wife purring as the talk turns to Dag Hammarskjöld and the challenges facing the U.N. All Americans would become what John Updike’s 60s characters wished they could be—sophisticated philanderers, with no old religion to ruin the fun.

In the decades since Hefner formulated his philosophy, the dream of a better America through orgasm has lost its satin sheen. Guilt-free promiscuity didn’t transform everyone into nymphs and satyrs, but resulted in busted marriages and dazed, questing offspring (Poster Child: Katie Roiphe). Drugs didn’t usher an army of angels through the doors of perception, but sent Hendrix, Joplin, Jim Morrison, Lenny Bruce, and lots of lesser-knowns into the morgue or out of their minds. Love beads and peace signs accessorized the sick vibes of Altamont and the Manson family. Crude, unbridled self-expression led to the needy narcissism of the Me Decade and eventually to Tom Arnold getting his own sitcom. Hedonism today isn’t Hef holding forth in the hot tub, it’s Charlie Sheen bouncing senseless off rock-candy mountains of silicone.

Maher has witnessed this human debris and has no illusions. His work as a comedian is based on the premise that Man (and by Man, I mean “most white guys”) is not a sun-blessed creature evolving toward perfection, but an incorrigible spud whose sneaky nature and base appetites haven’t changed since Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. In Seinfeld terms, we are all Newman: avidly up to no good. Maher’s pleasure principle is based on private choice, not part of a progressive social package. His is a tough-love hedonism that refuses to be guilt-tripped, to use a 60s term, by moans and groans on behalf of those less fortunate or able. He who wins the catbird seat has earned sole occupancy. Maher believes that in an imperfect world you’ve got to cut your losses. (Or as guest Dennis Miller put it, thin the herd.) So where the Playboy platform is anti-capital-punishment, Maher is pro, breezily observing after the Oklahoma-bombing sentence was delivered, “Tim McVeigh bought the farm, he is gonna fry.” When panelist Julianne Malveaux argued that it would be much crueler to leave McVeigh languishing behind bars for life, Maher mentioned that mass murderer Richard Speck partied hearty in prison, dressing in women’s clothes and doing drugs. “He was having better nights than I have,” Jon Stewart complained.

When we elected Bill Clinton, we knew what we were getting: a talented politician who took a big bite out of life—all parts of life.…Those who continue to whine about President Sex Machine should just shut up. —Bill Maher, opening monologue, Politically Incorrect (May 6, 1994).

While his mannerisms mimic Johnny Carson’s, Bill Maher expresses a deeper affinity in his P.I. monologues. He has assumed the characteristics of the presidency that has defined his show, and morphed into a junior, compact Bill Clinton. Both are Playboys at heart. (In another monologue, Maher said, “The man is president, after all, and if he can’t get some decent tail, what hope is there for the rest of us?”) Both are pro-capital-­punishment, pro-choice, post-traditional-liberalism, take-responsibility types. The difference is one of personal outreach. Clinton’s core ambition is clothed in soft, Elvis-y, mother-coddled flesh. Politics for him is more than power, it’s a love mission. In an essay entitled “Moist Eyes—From Rousseau to Clinton” in The Public Interest (Summer 1997), the political scientist Clifford Orwin posits a continuum from the cult of compassion and sincerity created by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—“Rousseau was the first to teach that we need be embarrassed neither to display our sufferings nor to witness such displays by others”—to the sensitive-guy bathos of Clinton, who transmits his liberalism bodily, conducting the healing process one hug at a time.

No one will accuse Maher of milking sentiment with moist eyes. His eyes are dry and unsparing. His heart is a tough nut to crack, except in the case of animal rights—“No more hunting, no more killing animals or mistreating them, period,” he told Playboy. Clinton, all appetite, is oral, Maher anal. Maher’s tight fix on himself works to his benefit on P.I. Since the comedy of our era is essentially anal-sadistic (the best example being The Larry Sanders Show—last season’s celebrity roast for Larry was La Grande Bouffe of anal humor), Maher not only is in sync with such hostility but expresses and embodies a Clinton-without-apologies—a Clinton unbound. His motto might be “Feel your own damned pain.” When a guest solemnly invoked the slain children of the Oklahoma bombing, Maher said sarcastically, “Oh, stop with the babies. I know, I know … ” And he was tonally right—the guest was using Dead Children as a rhetorical device. On another show, the novelist and travel writer Paul The­roux, whose suave prose has always curved like a blade to a pointed sneer, espoused the hope that the execution of Timothy McVeigh would make him a martyr. “Yeah, make him a martyr. Then when all these people come out of the woodwork saying, ‘What did you do to Tim?’—machine-gun them.” Maher had finally met his misanthropic match.

Bill Maher has grown in office on Politically Incorrect, or at least settled into the chair. When he was on Comedy Central, he tended to hold sitting filibusters and dictate the course of the conversation; more secure now (success smooths a lot of creases), he lets the guests have some to-and-fro without elbowing in to remind them who’s the star. His sly confidence becomes even more apparent when you compare Politically Incorrect with programs that try to copy its success. CNBC’s Charles Grodin recently rejiggered his talk show to a floating-panel concept (some guests in the studio, some via satellite), and the result is static and grim, like watching a hostage situation unfold among the formerly famous. (To paraphrase Sartre, Hell is other has-beens.) MSNBC has brought forth a litter of puppy pundits, who seem to be modeling sweaters for the J. Crew catalogue as they huddle around a table and fill dead air with deader air. Only Maher has kept the electricity going. It’d be nice if he were a nicer person, but unlike Jay Leno, he never campaigned to be our pal. As a fellow comic said of Maher, “If you can come into your own, even if it’s despicable, it’s part of the journey.”